Unsolved homicides weigh on families, investigators

Even with dramatic advances in forensic technology and investigative techniques, some homicides cases languish for years or decades before someone is arrested, and others are never explained.

Neal Simpson The Patriot Ledger @nsimpson_ledger

QUINCY -- It wasn’t easy for Elaine White Newcomb to leave her little house on the marsh and the Houghs Neck neighbors who continued to visit long after they’d grown from boys to men.

But after waiting years for an answer in the 2006 unsolved murder of her son, Christopher White, a popular chef whose badly burned body was found in a Braintree apartment that had been set ablaze, she had to get away. And even in her new home in South Carolina, she can’t stop thinking about who might have killed her only son.

“You try to put it on the back burner and you try to live day to day,” she said. “But I still think of him every day, and it’s been eight years.”

Newcomb is part of a small community of parents, siblings, spouses and friends who find themselves caught in a kind of purgatory after a loved one is murdered, unable to move on without knowing for sure who is responsible. Even with dramatic advances in forensic technology and investigative techniques, some homicides cases languish for years or decades before someone is arrested, and others are never explained.

But Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey says that doesn’t mean those cases have gone cold.

“No one around here refers to a case that is still open as cold,” he said. “They are unresolved cases and they require our attention.”

Massachusetts law enforcement agencies don’t keep a statewide tally of open homicide cases, but one analysis suggests that more than 2,000 killings in the state over the last three decades remain unsolved. The analysis of FBI data by the Scripps Howard News Service found that 2,022 of 5,129 homicides in Massachusetts between 1980 and 2008 were considered unsolved.

Raffi Yessayan, a Quincy defense attorney who led the gang unit in the Suffolk County district attorney's office for 11 years, said investigators have probably identified the likely killer in many of those cases but don’t yet have strong enough evidence to convict them. For those cases, he said, it becomes a “waiting game” for prosecutors until the day when some new piece of evidence gives them a winning case.

“It might fall on the back burner, but it’s still there and they’re always thinking about it,” he said.

Often, Yessayan said, the evidence that leads to an arrest comes from the changing lives of those involved in the crime: A suspect who ends up behind bars on another crime may boast about a killing to another inmate, who then offers to testify in hopes of getting a reduced sentence; or a girlfriend who kept quite during an investigation may speak up after she breaks up with a suspect; or a witness who didn’t come forward for fear of retaliation may suddenly find the courage to talk with police. Every case is different, he said, and prosecutors never known when something will come along that re-ignites an investigation.

In Norfolk County, the unsolved homicide cases from the last decade include a Plymouth woman whose smoldering body was found a few feet from a walking trail in the Blue Hills, a Braintree mother who was shot to death in her apartment while her 8-year-old daughter was at school, and two men, both fathers, who were killed in a drive-by shooting in Milton.

They also include the unsolved death of Newcomb’s son, who was 29, owned a catering company and sponsored a softball team. He was found dead in his East Braintree apartment by firefighters putting out a fire that investigators believe was set to cover up the killing. Authorities eventually ruled the death a homicide, but have never said y how he died.

Elaine White Newcomb said she was in constant contact with investigators at first, but heard from them less as time went on. She has not spoken to an investigator in about four years, but she still calls the district attorney’s office several times a year to talk with a liaison about the status of the case.

Newcomb said she’s frustrated by the absence of any news every time she calls, but she says she understands investigators can’t make an arrest until they have enough evidence. She said the last thing she wants is for someone to be charged with her son’s murder only to walk free after a trial because police rushed the investigation.

She said she’s confident that she’ll look her son’s killer in the eyes one day, either in this life or the next. Meanwhile, every call to the district attorney’s office leaves her frustrated once again.

“It’s the same story and it gets tiresome, really,” she said. “They’re not doing anything, and I guess they can’t until they’re definitely sure of the person who did it.”

There have been some cold case successes over the years.

In 2006, authorities announced that they had made an arrest in the four-year-old murder of Daniel DeCosta, a 43-year-old custodian whose body was found in 2002 behind the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy. Officials said they were able to link Carlos Seino of Randolph to the murder after State Police technicians cross-checked DNA from blood samples found on DeCosta’s body with a database of other samples and found a match from Seino’s arrested for an unrelated crime two years after the murder. Seino was convicted in 2008.

In 2007, authorities made two arrests in the brutal beating deaths of David Lyons and William Chrapan, two homeless men whose bludgeoned bodies were found in an abandoned bunker near Bare Cove Park in Hingham two years earlier. Plymouth County prosecutors said then that the break in the case came when an informant told them that two white supremacists, James Winquist and Eric Snow, had bragged about the killings at a party and and showed off a severed hand that they’d taken as a trophy from one of the murdered men.

Snow killed himself in jail while awaiting trial, according to officials, and Winquist was convicted of the murders in 2012. He was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences and has an appeal pending in the state Appeals Court.

Investigators hope for similar results in other cases. In Morrisey’s office, the district attorney says every unsolved homicide case is assigned to a state trooper who is expected to review the evidence a few times each year and do any testing or interviews that they think might yield new clues. And he said they’re always ready to consider any new theories or look at missed evidence that the public brings them.

“We do what we can to resolve these cases,” he said. “We encourage people to come forward with any kinds of suggestions or ideas.”

Contact Neal Simpson at nesimpson@ledger.com or follow him on Twitter @NSimpson_Ledger.